This is what being all marketing and no substance looks like.
What big companies think is cool and innovative is always several years behind what actually is cool and innovative. And they always miss the point, in this case what the idea of crypto is.
But big companies are masters of shouting loudly, as in this case where JPMC's PR has gotten this story out in just about every major outlet. Whether this is anything beyond a PR exercise I don't know, I get the feeling there are some quite strong internal forces that will not be interested in actually using this.
Someone I know works for a big 4 that is also roughly at this point in the delayed hype cycle. They are furiously selling blockchain solutions to everyone who will listen, and doing quite well at it. They did a firmwide review of internal skills recently, and amazingly there are zero staff who have any idea what a smart contract is. You wouldn't know if reading about them in the news, but they are getting paid millions and millions for various projects that are currently undeliverable.
They chase profits. These businesses tend to be very siloed and if they lose money on a new business venture, it's their money that's lost and not depositors. They are probably absorbing a tiny fraction of the risk they absorbed by making shaky but traditional investments in the early 2000s.
Does it have to be cool, though? If banks find a use case for blockchain technology, and they go ahead and implement it in some way so that it is only used by banks, how is that a missed point?
It's not, in fact it would prove a point that seems to have been missed by the cryptocurrency community at large - even if blockchain does become useful, it seems unlikely that big banks or countries are going to start using the existing coins and enrich the current holders.
What big companies think is cool and innovative is always several years behind what actually is cool and innovative. And they always miss the point, in this case what the idea of crypto is.
But big companies are masters of shouting loudly, as in this case where JPMC's PR has gotten this story out in just about every major outlet. Whether this is anything beyond a PR exercise I don't know, I get the feeling there are some quite strong internal forces that will not be interested in actually using this.
Someone I know works for a big 4 that is also roughly at this point in the delayed hype cycle. They are furiously selling blockchain solutions to everyone who will listen, and doing quite well at it. They did a firmwide review of internal skills recently, and amazingly there are zero staff who have any idea what a smart contract is. You wouldn't know if reading about them in the news, but they are getting paid millions and millions for various projects that are currently undeliverable.